SOS - lost my hard drive

[-dave-]

Do you know where you lost it?

 

[chris.hale]

Must be using Windows. Linux for the win.

Linux is great, but immune to hard drive failure it is not.

 

[phillylion]

Any recommendations for something that does backups? Not only for the data but an entire image, including the OS?

 

[sliwolf]

I have my image on a external SSD , just cloned it with an imaging software.

 

[Soron]

Depends on how easy to use you want it and cost. I personally use clonezilla as it is free and clones only the data portions of the drive not the extra space on the platters, is os agnostic and can be used either for single machines or groups of them on a network (mass cloning is fun) but it does require familiarity with Linux, other than that you can try Symantic ghost or acronis imaging software as they are easier to use compared to that.

 

[AABCDS]

Lost your email? Your email is being saved on the server of the email provider and not on your local hard disk. You should be able to login to the email via your webbrowser.

What do you mean with you have lost your drive? Does your OS doesn't start up? Do you get a blue screen with some error codes? Does it spin? if you get an error please tell me.

Maybe you can do a system recovery.

If it does spin and you get some error code you still can use HiRen boot CD to get your documents. If you have an another computer you can put the harddisk as a second harddisk in the other computer. You should be able to see all your files.

If the drive spins you can fix this easily, if it doesn't spin that the harddisk is toasted. I have fixed these kind of problems many times.

Please let me know.

+1.

Just reset the password for all the sites you use. Your account information for websites is not stored on your hard drive.

 

[frstplce]

On a related note, Roboform backs up everything online. Or at least my copy does. Works nicely with the iOS app too. That combined with a cloud solution like Dropbox or Onedrive means my drive could go tomorrow and I wouldn't lose anything of real importance.

What others have said is true. In most cases the drive will still be functional enough for data recovery. So there is still hope if you really wanted to recover that data.

 

[alfredus]

I think rsync (or grsync with GUI) is very powerful - don't know if it works outside the Linux world though...

 

[phrogpilot73]

I have to use Windows for my home business (I bought a franchise and their systems don't work with Linux at all. Was originally running a Windows partition in VMWare, but since it's a busines...) and I back it up with EaseUS Todo backup. Does system images, incremental backups, to a network share, etc... Very reliable. Quarterly, I do a clonezilla of the OS drive (most of my data is on my RAID server) just in case.